Privacy Policy

Last updated: 5 September 2026.

This policy takes effect on 18 September 2026. Until then, the previous version remains the operative Privacy & Cookie Policy.

1. Who we are

SmartResume ("we", "us", "our") operates www.smartresumeltd.com and its related web, mobile, and browser-extension applications. We are the data controller for the personal data described in this policy. This policy explains what personal data we collect, why we collect it, the legal bases we rely on, and the rights you have under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018. The browser extension is described in its own section, section 13, which sets out where it runs, what it sends us and what it keeps on your own device.

Controller: Smart Resume Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 16403054), with its registered office at 86 Mornington Crescent, Hounslow, London, TW5 9SS. We are established in the United Kingdom. Our ICO registration reference is ZB985408.

2. Data we collect

We process the following categories of personal data:

  • Account data: name, email address, password hash, and authentication-provider identifiers.
  • Resume and career content: work history, education, skills, and other content you author or upload.
  • Application activity: jobs viewed, saved, and applied to; application status and outcomes.
  • Communications: messages exchanged with recruiters, support requests, and notification preferences.
  • Interview-practice data: mock-interview responses and, only if you explicitly enable it, video recordings.
  • Usage and device data: log data, IP address, browser/device metadata, and privacy-preserving analytics events.
  • Payment data: your subscription tier and billing status, and the name and billing address you give on the checkout page. We keep that name and address because a UK VAT invoice must state the name and address of the person supplied (VAT Regulations 1995 reg. 14(1)(e)), so we hold it to meet a legal obligation and keep it with the rest of our billing records for six years. Payment-card details are handled by our payment provider and are never stored by us directly.

3. How we use AI

SmartResume uses generative-AI models to power features such as resume-writing assistance, scoring, chat, translation, and job matching. Every generative-AI call is routed through a single internal AI Gateway. No part of our applications ever calls an AI provider directly. The gateway:

  • redacts personally identifying information from prompts before any prompt leaves the platform for a provider;
  • uses a tiered set of AI providers (a primary provider with automatic failover to secondary providers) rather than sending your data from your device to a provider;
  • meters the cost of AI usage per user and per feature, and caps free-tier AI usage accordingly.

By default we do not use your content to train AI models. You control this through the "Keep my data out of AI model training" setting, which is on by default (see section 4). We do not sell your personal data. If you use AI-assisted interview help (mock-interview practice or the Live Interview Copilot), your use of those tools is candidate-only data and is never shared with recruiters (see section 5).

4. Consent and how to change it

When you create an account you must agree to the processing of your personal data and accept our Terms of Service. Beyond those, we offer a set of optional consents that are off by default (except AI-training opt-out, which is on by default to protect you). You can review and change any of these at any time from Settings → Privacy → Consents. Withdrawing consent does not affect the lawfulness of processing carried out before withdrawal.

The optional consent categories are:

  • Product updates and promotions (marketing) — off by default. Promotional contact only if you opt in.
  • Keep my data out of AI model training — on by default. We do not use your data to train AI models unless you turn this off. This is an opt-out control: leaving it on is the protective state.
  • Video recording — off by default. Lets us record video during mock interviews. Recordings auto-delete after 30 days, and each session asks again.
  • Location data — off by default. Improves local job matches and commute estimates.
  • Sharing with job boards — off by default. Lets us pass your profile to partner job boards when you apply through them.
  • Third-party integrations — off by default. Enables optional integrations with third-party services you connect.
  • Social sharing of achievements — off by default. Lets you share achievement highlights outside SmartResume. This is separate from third-party integrations; granting one does not grant the other.

5. Interview practice and Live Copilot privacy

Self-practice mock-interview data and Live Interview Copilot suggestions are candidate-only. They are never shared with recruiters, and this is enforced at the database and API layer, not only in the interface. Live Copilot never records video and never posts or speaks on your behalf. Where you have enabled video recording for mock interviews, those recordings automatically delete after 30 days.

We do not analyse your face, your voiceprint, or your emotions. Interview practice feedback is based only on the text of your answer (what you typed or what your spoken answer transcribes to) and objective, non-biometric delivery measures such as words per minute, pauses, and answer length. We perform no face-geometry, voiceprint, facial-landmark, or expression or emotion analysis, and no third-party service on this path does either.

6. Email inbox tracking

Email inbox tracking works by forwarding, not by connecting to your mailbox. When you enable it, we give you a unique SmartResume forwarding address; you forward job-related emails to it, or set a one-time auto-forward filter with your email provider. We do not access, read, or connect to your email account, and we request no email-provider permissions. It works with any email provider.

We parse the emails you forward server-side to derive status events (for example, that an interview-invitation email was detected), then discard the message. We never store the raw content of forwarded emails — only the derived status event. Classifying a forwarded email may use our AI Gateway (the same PII-redacted, tiered-provider system described in section 3 above).

7. Saving jobs from other sites

Our job-capture feature acts only on a single job you choose to save, one item at a time and always at your initiative. We do not bulk-crawl, enumerate, or scrape third-party sites, and we do not fetch content from login-walled pages. Content captured from third-party sites is sanitised before any AI processing.

8. Analytics and cookies

Our web analytics, when enabled, is a self-hosted, cookieless tool (Umami) that sets no cookies, collects no personally identifying information in its events, and does not track you across other websites. We do not use third-party advertising or cross-site tracking. We do not currently set cookies at all: your sign-in state is held in your browser's local storage on your device, not in a cookie. If we introduce strictly necessary cookies in the future, we will update this policy first.

9. Data retention and deletion

We keep personal data only as long as necessary for the purposes described in this policy, or as required by law. User-generated content (resumes, applications, and similar records) is soft-deleted rather than immediately erased: when you delete such content it is retained recoverably for a limited window before permanent removal, so you can restore it from Trash. Mock-interview video recordings auto-delete after 30 days. When you close your account we delete or anonymise your personal data, subject to any legal retention obligations.

10. International transfers and subprocessors

To provide the service we use a small number of third-party processors ("subprocessors"). Some are located outside the United Kingdom; where personal data is transferred internationally we rely on appropriate safeguards such as the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or adequacy regulations. Our subprocessors are:

  • AI providers — accessed only through our internal AI Gateway, with PII redacted before any prompt is sent. These include Anthropic (Claude) as our primary provider, and may include OpenAI and Google as automatic failover providers, only where that tier is enabled.
  • Neon — managed PostgreSQL database hosting.
  • Hostinger — virtual private server hosting for our backend services.
  • Vercel — hosting for our web front end.
  • Stripe — processing of subscription payments. Billing is handled by Stripe, a PCI-DSS-compliant payment processor, and we never store your card details.
  • Mailgun (EU region) — inbound email parsing for the forwarding-based application tracking feature described in section 6; receives forwarded mail transiently and passes it to our webhook; raw content is discarded after a status event is derived.

We keep this list current and will update it as our processors change.

Payment providers you choose at checkout (independent controllers)

Payment is taken on Stripe's own checkout page, which offers you a choice of how to pay: a card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, or a direct debit (Bacs or SEPA). We may add or remove methods over time.

Whichever you choose, the credentials never reach us — your card number, your PayPal sign-in and your bank details go to the provider, and we neither see nor store them. What does happen is a disclosure: the provider you pick learns that you are paying Smart Resume Ltd, and learns the amount and the transaction. That provider then handles the payment under its own terms with you, as an independent controller — the same relationship you already have with your bank or card issuer. It is not acting on our instructions, so it is described here rather than listed among the subprocessors above.

11. Your rights (UK GDPR)

Subject to applicable law, you have the right to access, correct, delete, restrict, or port your personal data, and to object to certain processing. Where we rely on consent, you may withdraw it at any time. To exercise any of these rights, contact us using the details in section 12. If you are unsatisfied with our response, you may complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority, at ico.org.uk.

12. Contact us

For any privacy question or to exercise your rights, contact our data-protection contact: Amer Rauf, Founder. Email: privacy@smartresumeltd.com. Post: Smart Resume Ltd, 86 Mornington Crescent, Hounslow, London, TW5 9SS.

13. The SmartResume browser extension

This section describes the SmartResume browser extension specifically. It is additional to the rest of this policy and does not replace it: the legal bases, the sharing rules, the retention rules and your rights apply to data the extension sends us in exactly the same way as they apply to data you give us on the website. The extension helps you apply for jobs. It can fill your saved details into an application form, keep a local copy of what you have typed so a page reload does not lose it, highlight keywords from a job advert, and — only when you ask it to — send the visible text of the page you are looking at to us for a compatibility assessment against one of your saved resumes. You must sign in through it before any feature that involves us is available.

  • Where it runs — it is installed to run automatically on five applicant-tracking-system site patterns only: greenhouse.io, lever.co, workday.com, myworkdayjobs.com and workable.com. On any other site it does nothing until you grant access for that site yourself, which your browser asks you to confirm at the moment you click.
  • What leaves your browser, and to whom — nothing about a page you merely visit. The only case in which the content of a page leaves your browser is when you ask for a compatibility assessment, and then we receive the visible text of the page you are on, up to the first 20,000 characters, together with the page's best-effort title (cut to 300 characters) and the identifier of the saved resume the extension has chosen for you. Everything the extension sends over the network goes to the SmartResume API and to nowhere else.
  • No analytics, and no tracking — the extension contains no analytics, telemetry, crash-reporting or advertising component and reports no usage data to us or to anyone else. It does not read your clipboard, your browsing history, your bookmarks, your cookies or your downloads, it synchronises nothing between your devices through the browser, and it transmits nothing to any party other than SmartResume.
  • How the compatibility assessment is made — it is calculated deterministically on our servers by comparing terms, and it is not sent to any AI model provider. Where we do use AI providers, as section 3 explains, we do so through our own AI Gateway; the extension holds no provider credentials and cannot contact a provider itself.
  • What it keeps inside your browser — your signed-in session tokens, which your browser clears when it shuts down; unsent form drafts, expiring 7 days after they are written, capped at 25 drafts and at 50,000 bytes each; your chosen language and your acknowledgement of the extension’s in-product disclosure; a short-lived count of recent fill attempts per website; and answers to saved application questions. None of these is sent to us, and uninstalling the extension removes all of them. Signing out discards the session token that device is holding and erases every saved draft on it; the saved-answers store is not cleared by signing out, and nothing in this build ever writes to it.
  • What may be drafted, and what is refused — only a free-text box and a text, email, telephone, web-address or search box are ever drafted. A drop-down list, radio buttons, a checkbox, a password box, a file upload and the number and date controls are refused whatever they are called, and a word filter over a field’s name and label excludes payment, banking, government-identifier, date-of-birth and password terms. That word filter is best-effort, and we would rather say so than claim a guarantee the code does not provide: a diversity-monitoring question asked as an ordinary text box is not currently recognised by it. Anything that is drafted stays on your own device and is never sent to us.
  • The extension never submits an application for you — it will fill a form and keep a draft of what you have typed, but the final "submit" is always yours. It never clicks a submit button, never triggers a form submission, and never simulates the keystrokes that would do so. This is a fixed property of the product, not a setting.

This section describes the extension as built on 3 September 2026, checked against its own source code and its packaged manifests rather than against its intended design. The extension is not yet published to the Chrome Web Store, to Microsoft Edge Add-ons, to Firefox Add-ons or to any other store, so no member of the public is running the build described here. Because an extension’s permissions, network requests and stored items can change with any release, this section is re-verified before each store submission and amended in a new version of this policy if any part of it has ceased to be accurate.